Why Most People Think They're Critical Thinkers (But Aren't)

The bloke sitting across from me in the boardroom last month was absolutely convinced he was Sherlock Holmes reincarnated. "I'm a critical thinker," he announced proudly after presenting what was essentially a glorified gut feeling wrapped in PowerPoint slides. The irony was thicker than Vegemite on toast – here was someone who couldn't critically evaluate his own thinking, declaring himself a master of critical evaluation.

After two decades of watching people confuse critical thinking with being critical, cynical, or just plain stubborn, I've developed what some might call a controversial opinion: most professionals are terrible at actual critical thinking, especially when it comes to problem-solving. And the worst part? They genuinely believe they're brilliant at it.

The Great Critical Thinking Delusion

Walk into any workplace in Melbourne, Sydney, or Perth, and you'll find at least three people who'll tell you they're "natural problem solvers" and "critical thinkers." Ask them to define what that actually means, and you'll get responses ranging from "I question everything" to "I don't just accept things at face value." Both statements miss the mark entirely.

Real critical thinking isn't about being sceptical – it's about being systematically analytical.

The confusion started somewhere in the 90s when every management consultant began throwing around "critical thinking" like confetti at a wedding. Suddenly, every argumentative employee became a "critical thinker," every contrarian was "challenging assumptions," and every person who asked "but why?" thought they were conducting rigorous analysis. The reality is that proper critical thinking training requires structure, discipline, and – here's the kicker – admitting when you're wrong.

I learned this the hard way in 2019 when I confidently presented a solution to our biggest client's productivity issues. I'd done my "critical thinking," questioned assumptions, gathered data, and felt pretty smug about my analysis. Three months later, productivity had actually decreased by 12%. My critical thinking had been nothing more than confirmation bias dressed up in business speak.

What Critical Thinking Actually Looks Like in Problem Solving

Here's something that might ruffle feathers: true critical thinking in problem-solving situations feels uncomfortable. It should make you question your favourite solutions, challenge your preferred approaches, and occasionally lead you to conclusions you don't like. If your critical thinking process always confirms what you already believed, you're not thinking critically – you're just thinking.

Take Qantas, for example. Love them or hate them (and plenty of people have opinions), their approach to safety problem-solving demonstrates genuine critical thinking. When they investigate incidents, they don't start with assumptions about pilot error or mechanical failure. They systematically work through evidence, challenge their own procedures, and often discover problems in places they didn't expect. That's not comfortable thinking – that's critical thinking.

The same principle applies to workplace problem-solving, though most people skip the uncomfortable bits. Real critical thinking means:

Actively seeking information that contradicts your initial hypothesis. Most people gather evidence that supports their gut feeling and call it research. Critical thinkers do the opposite – they try to prove themselves wrong first.

Distinguishing between correlation and causation, even when the correlation is convenient. Just because sales dropped after you changed the website doesn't mean the website change caused the drop. Could be seasonal variation, could be economic factors, could be that your competitor launched a better product. Critical thinking means exploring all possibilities, not just the obvious ones.

Recognising your own cognitive biases and compensating for them. This is where most people fail spectacularly. We all have biases – confirmation bias, anchoring bias, availability bias – but critical thinkers acknowledge them and build systems to counteract them.

The Australian Problem-Solving Approach

There's something distinctly Australian about our approach to problem-solving that both helps and hinders critical thinking. On one hand, our "she'll be right" attitude can prevent us from overthinking simple problems. On the other hand, it can stop us from thinking deeply enough about complex ones.

We're brilliant at pragmatic solutions and terrible at systematic analysis.

I see this constantly in problem-solving workshops across the country. Give an Australian team a practical problem, and they'll MacGyver a solution with whatever's available. But ask them to methodically evaluate why the problem occurred in the first place, and suddenly everyone's checking their phones.

This isn't necessarily bad – sometimes pragmatic trumps perfect. But when you're dealing with recurring issues, systemic problems, or strategic decisions, you need more than intuition and ingenuity. You need the kind of structured analytical thinking that makes most of us uncomfortable.

The thing is, critical thinking isn't meant to replace Australian practicality – it's meant to enhance it. When Bunnings revolutionised hardware retail, they didn't just rely on "common sense" about what customers wanted. They systematically analysed shopping patterns, questioned assumptions about store layout, and tested hypotheses about customer behaviour. The result was a retail format that seems obvious in hindsight but required genuine critical analysis to develop.

Why Smart People Struggle Most

Here's an uncomfortable truth: the smarter you are, the harder critical thinking becomes. Intelligence gives you better tools for rationalising poor decisions and defending flawed reasoning. I've watched brilliant engineers, lawyers, and executives tie themselves in logical knots rather than admit their initial analysis was wrong.

Smart people are particularly susceptible to what psychologists call the "bias blind spot" – the tendency to recognise bias in others while remaining oblivious to your own. They'll confidently identify logical fallacies in their colleague's presentations while missing the glaring assumptions in their own analysis.

The solution isn't to think less – it's to think more systematically. This means establishing clear criteria for evaluating solutions before you start generating them. It means actively seeking out people who disagree with you, not to argue with them, but to understand their perspective. It means building regular "assumption audits" into your problem-solving process.

Making Critical Thinking Stick

The real challenge isn't learning critical thinking techniques – there are plenty of frameworks, from the Six Thinking Hats to root cause analysis methodologies. The challenge is applying them consistently, especially when you're under pressure, confident in your expertise, or dealing with familiar problems.

I've found that the most effective approach is what I call "critical thinking habits" rather than critical thinking events. Instead of having one big analytical session, build small analytical steps into your regular workflow. Before every meeting, spend two minutes identifying what assumptions you're bringing to the discussion. After every decision, spend five minutes considering what evidence might contradict your choice.

The goal isn't to second-guess every decision or become paralysed by analysis. It's to develop what some researchers call "intellectual humility" – the recognition that your initial analysis might be incomplete, biased, or just plain wrong.

And that's okay.

Better to be wrong and discover it quickly than to be wrong and discover it after six months of implementation. Critical thinking in problem-solving isn't about being right the first time – it's about being adaptive enough to course-correct when new evidence emerges.

The bloke from that boardroom meeting? Six months later, his "critical analysis" had cost the company roughly $200,000 in wasted resources. He's still convinced he was thinking critically. The difference between him and someone who actually practices critical thinking isn't intelligence or experience – it's the willingness to systematically examine your own reasoning, especially when you're confident it's correct.

That's the hardest part of critical thinking: using it most rigorously when you need it least – or think you do.